brown and fleming - schizo analysis and fight club

Deterritorialisation and Schizoanalysis inDavid Fincher’s Fight Club

William Brown and David H. FlemingRoehampton University/University of Nottingham, Ningbo

Abstract

Taking a schizoanalytic approach to audio-visual images, this articleexplores some of the radical potentia for deterritorialisation foundwithin David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999). The film’s potential fordeterritorialisation is initially located in an exploration of the film’sform and content, which appear designed to interrogate and transcenda series of false binaries between mind and body, inside and outside,male and female. Paying attention to the construction of photorealisticdigital spaces and composited images, we examine the actual (andpossible) ways viewers relate to the film, both during and afterscreenings. Recognising the film as an affective force performingwithin our world, we also investigate some of the real-world effectsthe film catalysed. Finally, we propose that schizoanalysis, whenapplied to a Hollywood film, suggests that Deleuze underestimatedthe deterritorialising potential of contemporary, special effects-drivencinema. If schizoanalysis has thus been reterritorialised by mainstreamproducts, we argue that new, ‘post-Deleuzian’ lines of flight are requiredto disrupt this ‘de-re-territorialisation’.

Keywords: schizoanalysis, Fight Club, mind–body, digital, de-/re-territorialisation

Deleuze Studies 5.2 (2011): 275–299DOI: 10.3366/dls.2011.0021© Edinburgh University Presswww.eupjournals.com/dls

276 William Brown and David H. Fleming

I. Introduction

In Anti-Oedipus (1983), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari advanced aradical conception of desire, no longer shackled to absence and lack, butbased on a productive process of presence and becoming. Rather thanthe old ‘Oedipalising’ models of psychoanalysis, whereby the subject isconstituted or gains an identity through identification with somethingthat is always already lost (identity as having a fixed goal, telos, or, inanother sense, a reified essence), Deleuze and Guattari proposed thatidentity constantly undergoes shifts and changes, in response to, or inaccordance with, the situation in which it finds itself. The process ofbecoming (as opposed to the ‘thing’ of being) that Deleuze and Guattaridescribe, then, is one in which the conventional distinctions betweeninside and outside, actual and virtual, and even between self and othersignificantly blur. To comprehend and understand the world thus, aswell as the works of art it contains, is known as schizoanalysis.

In this essay, we employ a schizoanalytic approach to expose theradical potential for deterritorialisation (that is, the upsetting of thoseconventional distinctions listed above – and perhaps even the upsettingof distinctions per se) to be found in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999).As we shall show, this potential for deterritorialisation is located at thelevel of form and content, and in the effects the film displays in the realworld (that is, on spectators). In other words, we shall explore not onlywhat happens in the narrative (its content), but also how the film itselfis put together (its form) and functions in the world. Particular attentionwill be paid to the film’s construction of photorealistic digital spaces andcomposited images, before examining the actual (and possible) ways inwhich audiences relate to the film, during and after screenings. Finally,we shall adventurously propose that schizoanalysis, when applied toa Hollywood film as here, suggests one or both of two things: thatDeleuze underestimated the deterritorialising potential of contemporary,special effects-driven cinema, and/or that schizoanalysis has itself beenreterritorialised if found in mainstream products. In this manner, wehighlight how new, ‘post-Deleuzian’ lines of flight are required to disruptthis ‘de-re-territorialisation’.

II. Fight Club

Fight Club has already garnered much academic attention, beingschizophrenically read through a plethora of critical and discursivelenses/paradigms. Amongst others, it has been read as a film dealing

Deterritorialisation and Schizoanalysis in Fight Club 277

with, or invocative of: a/the contemporary ‘crisis of masculinity’ (Taubin1999; Giroux 2001; Friday 2003), capitalism and consumerism (Girouxand Szeman 2001; Ta 2006; Lizardo 2007), violence and pain (Windrum2004; Gormley 2005), fascism and anarchy (Dassanowsky 2007;Chandler and Tallon 2008), auteurism (Orgeron 2002; Swallow 2003)and the gaze (Church Gibson 2004). While some discussions of the filmmake mention of Deleuze’s work – for example, Grønstad (2003), whoconcentrates on masochism – only Patricia Pisters (2003) has treated thefilm to an (albeit brief) Deleuzian analysis to date, illuminating an absentpeople’s becoming, a political mobilisation of a class of violence, and anexpressive interplay between time- and movement-image regimes. Weshould like to acknowledge the validity of all of these heterogeneousanalyses, for the film is rich enough to allow for their co-existence, butwe should also like to extend these much further, particularly Pisters’sinterpretation, to see what feedback the film offers to help us (better)understand Deleuze (and Guattari).

Based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel (1999), Fight Club tells thestory of an unnamed narrator, often referred to as Jack (EdwardNorton), who suffers from insomnia and convinces himself he isill. Initially, a cynical doctor sardonically advises he attend therapygroups for disease sufferers, so he can see real suffering. Attendingthe sessions allows him to find a strong emotional release, and he isagain able to sleep – that is, until a woman called Marla Singer (HelenaBonham Carter) begins attending the same groups and re-activates hissleeplessness.

The narrator’s day job as an insurance recall co-ordinator finds himevaluating whether it will be cheaper for his car company to recall faultyproducts or settle lawsuits in or out of court. This involves extensivetravel across the USA, and during one trip he encounters the enigmaticanarchist Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Thereafter, he returns home to findhis apartment destroyed by an explosion seemingly ignited by a gas leak.He contacts Tyler, who invites him to stay at his dilapidated house, butnot before asking the narrator to punch him. Reluctantly, the narratorhits Tyler, and they begin scrapping. By degrees Fight Club is born. Theennui of modern life and a/the crisis in masculinity mean that otherdisaffected males are drawn to the nocturnal fights. Since participantsfind these physical experiences immensely satisfying, the clubs beginto proliferate. For the narrator, actively fighting allows him to sleepagain more than simply observing and sharing in others’ suffering. Intime, Tyler turns Fight Club into Project Mayhem, a covert organisationdriven to overthrow late capitalism – initially through minor acts of


vandalism, which escalate into a terrorist plot to destroy financialcorporations and blow up their headquarters.

Aware the narrator is no longer attending therapy sessions, Marlacontacts him to find out why. She initially hams up an attention-grabbingsuicide attempt, which the narrator ignores, but to which Tyler responds.As a result, Tyler commences an intensely sexual relationship withMarla, which the narrator finds distasteful, as he does Project Mayhem,from which Tyler likewise excludes him. As the narrator attempts toretard Project Mayhem, he increasingly discovers many of the meninvolved in it, impossibly, know him, even though he remains convincedhe has never met them. As the terrorist plot inexorably heads towards itscataclysmic apogee, the narrator finally realises the members of ProjectMayhem do know him, but not as the famous founder of Fight Club, butbecause he is Tyler Durden. As Tyler, the narrator has met them before.

Realising he has been the architect of Project Mayhem, the narratortries to bring about its end by killing the part of himself that is Tyler – byshooting himself in the head. The bullet dislocates his jaw, but thegesture is seemingly enough to ‘kill’ Tyler. However, this action doesnot prevent the organisation from achieving its anarchic goals. The filmends, therefore, as several corporate towers collapse, and as the finalcredits begin to roll, a six-frame splice-in of a man’s penis is insertedinto the film – evidence, seemingly, that Tyler is in fact not dead, sincewe know from the narrative that he habitually inserted single frames ofpornography into films whilst working as a projectionist.

III. Against Mind–Body Dualism

Below, we argue Fight Club features deterritorialisations that enablebecomings through the body as well as deterritorialisations that enablebecomings through the brain. By the latter, we mean the images we seemight depict the thoughts of the narrator (thoughts that take bodily formare embodied in the cases of the other figures that we see onscreen),and by the former, we mean the film features moments in which thenarrator’s visible physical state can lead to new thoughts, as perhapsis most recognisable in the case of insomnia, where a physical state(prolonged waking) induces fantasy hallucinations. Both becomingsimply that brain and body are not as easy to separate as we mightbelieve, if we were to adopt a ‘classical’ Cartesian mode of thought.However, in order to commence our schizoanalytic reading of the film,and in order to break down the binary opposition between body andbrain, we should like to spend some time elaborating what this means


at the level of content, before turning our attention to the correspondingthemes built into the form/style of the film.

Gaining momentum in the 1990s, those involved in cognitiveapproaches to cinema attempted to put distance between psychoanalyticand Marxist readings of films, particularly those inspired by ‘post-structuralist’ thought (see Bordwell and Carroll 1996). In the crossfirebetween cognitive and ‘post-structuralist’ approaches, Deleuze cameto be associated with the latter more than the former, perhaps dueto his status as a ‘continental’ philosopher. As such, scholars likeDavid Bordwell (1997: 116–17; 2010), while usefully identifying somelimitations of Deleuze’s film scholarship, go too far by dismissingit altogether. Although this is neither the time nor the place torehearse in detail the reasons for and in particular against Deleuze’sassociation with post-structuralist thought and his distantiation fromcognitive approaches, we should like to say that recent developmentsin neuroscience and other disciplines that often form the theoreticalbasis for cognitive approaches seem to suggest that Deleuzian modelsof mind–body parallelism were not far off the mark. Neuroscientistssuch as Antonio Damasio (1994; 1999) and philosophers like GeorgeLakoff and Mark Johnson (1999) have argued that not only is there no‘homunculus’ directing thought, but the brain is embodied and ‘basic’ or‘lower-level’ processes, from homeostasis to galvanic skin responses, areinfluential on emotions and feelings, which in turn are deeply influentialon thoughts. Thus, the brain is not uniquely a rational disembodiedtool that disregards ‘irrational’ phenomena like emotions and visceralresponses (or affects). Rather, whatever rational thought the brain iscapable of is dependent almost entirely upon what happens in the bodyand the fact that we have bodies at all.

Were cognitive film studies to look beyond its ‘continental’ and ‘post-structuralist’ thought prejudices, it might find Deleuze a useful allyprecisely for his articulation of a body–mind parallelism, somethingsymbolised in his overlap with Antonio Damasio via their sharedSpinozian interest (see Deleuze 1988; Damasio 2003), as outlined byWilliam E. Connolly (2006). In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuzedescribes how parallelism disallows any primacy of the brain over thebody, or of the body over the brain, which would be just as unintelligible(Deleuze 1988: 18). Mind and body are here freed of hierarchicalrelations, so that the brain becomes a partial machinic-component thatsends efferent signals to the body, while the body simultaneously sendsafferent orders to the brain, of which it is just a part and, correlatively,which is just a part of it. Spinoza’s dictum ‘Give me a body then’


comes to take on new meaning, as it can be through the body thatnew thought is achieved, with new physical states being matched bynew neuron connections in the brain. In Deleuze’s cinematic paradigm,to think becomes ‘to learn what a non-thinking body is capable of, itscapacity, its postures. It is through the body (and no longer through theintermediary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit,with thought’ (Deleuze 2005b: 182). The scene in Fight Club whereTyler inflicts a chemical lye burn on the narrator epitomises best thisnon-hierarchical relationship between the feeling body and the thinkingmind – and visually actualises a direct relationship between bodily senses(feeling) and brain activity (thought).

The scene starts as an action-image. Tyler holds the narrator andadministers powdered lye to a wet-kiss upon his hand. The excruciatingbodily pain caused by the chemical burn immediately catalyses a visceralthought-image montage that vies for prominence amongst the action-images. The film here displays what we might call a motific re-foldingof brain and body cinemas as the feelings and sensation of the physicalburn directly stimulate thought. The narrator initially attempts to applymeditation to escape the intense pain, and viewers are presented withserene images of a green forest. After returning to a close-up of the hand,now bubbling as his flesh chemically dissolves, mental images (opsigns)of fire and intertitle-like images isolating words like ‘searing’ and ‘flesh’intermix with sounds of intense burning and crackling (sonsigns). Thesecompete with Zen-like images of trees, birdsong and the narrator’shealing cave as he attempts to escape these overwhelming feelings andsensations. This begins to illuminate a powerful parallel-image sequence,wherein a brain-cinema montage overlaps performative action-imagesand affective bodily close-ups. The fact that Tyler is also coded as amental manifestation serves to introduce another level of actual/virtualfolding within the meniscus of the image. Thus, the images push and pullin two simultaneous directions that underscore a parallel relationshipbetween mind and body, feeling and thought. As this relationshipsurfaces throughout the film, the model of parallelism increasinglybecomes related to a process of immanent deterritorialisation.

IV. Deterritorialising the Body

When analysing films, it is often hard to separate form from content.As such, while we shall examine how Fight Club’s content (that is,its plot) involves the deterritorialisation of the narrator’s body in sucha way that schizoanalysis offers a suitable framework through which


to understand it, we shall also make explicit reference to the filmicform – although we reserve a prolonged analysis of form for a latersection. To better understand how the body is deterritorialised withinthe film, we respectively analyse the roles insomnia, hunger, cancerand violence play, as well as considering the various ways in whichthese deterritorialising forces allow the narrator to enter a liminal statewherein the boundaries between fantasy and reality, inside and outside,thought and action, begin to blur.

In a Deleuzian-inflected engagement with insomnia narratives, PatriciaPisters argues that ‘it is only when one is exhausted or “paralysed”that the sensory-motor action gives way to pure optical sound situations[and that] one enters into a dream world or visionary otherworldliness’(Pisters 2003: 136). After being sleepless for six months, thenarrator laments: ‘with insomnia nothing’s real. Everything’s far away.Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy’. These subjective experiencesare aesthetically reflected by images drained of colour, depth and sound,as well as expressively and expressionistically distorted effects, such ascrackling electrical charges that overlap edits, distended sounds thatwarp entire scenes, and ‘single-frame’ subliminal flashes of Tyler thatflicker within the mise-en-scène prior to his ‘real’ introduction. Here, theexhaustion created by the narrator’s insomnia provides the conditionsfor distorted formal images and sounds that viewers perceive. Althoughthese are implied hallucinations, it is hard to tell these ‘fantasy’ elementsapart from the narrator’s ‘real’ perceptions.

The film often depicts the narrator performing mundane tasks likebrushing his teeth or going to the toilet, but barely shows him eating.Significantly, when he opens his fridge, we see it is bare. While it isnever explicitly stated he is hungry or deliberately fasting, the mise-en-scène becomes suggestive of an ascetic drive that becomes anothercondition aiding his entry into a warped, dreamlike world where bodilyexperiences become inseparable from those of the brain (thought, orfantasy, becomes indistinguishable from reality). In an essay on ‘The“Fasting Body” and the Hunger for Pure Immanence’, psychotherapistJo Nash argues that fasting enables

an altered state of consciousness [to arise] that permits a collapsing of thedualistic affective divisions between subject and object, within and beyond,to enable an experience of transversal, trans-Oedipal desire to enjoy both,at one and the same time [. . . ]. Binary divisions of inner and outer, selfand other, mind and body, thought and feeling, are overcome, through aconscious decision to resist the desire to consume. (Nash 2006: 325–6)


The narrator’s lack of consumption on the physical level is eventuallysucceeded by his refusal to consume on what we might call a capitalistlevel later in the film. But while these initial conditions of insomnia andhunger set the scene for a primary deterritorialisation of the self throughthe body, the narrator finds himself reterritorialised by the physical andspiritual release he experiences by attending disease support groups inacts of ‘misery tourism’.

The narrator’s new-found ability to sleep and cry is in particularenabled by his physical interaction with a testicular cancer sufferercalled Bob (Meat Loaf Aday) who has developed (what the narratorcalls) ‘bitch tits’ as a result of his orchiectomy and subsequent chemicalimbalance. While the narrator attends therapy groups for genuinevictims of cancer, he is of course only a tourist among these sufferers.However, once Marla arrives and begins to infiltrate all the groups,not only can he no longer sleep again, but it is as if Marla becomes akind of cancer that infects him: ‘If I had a tumour, I’d call it Marla.’While this no doubt encourages a reading relating to the film’s surfacemisogyny and exclusive treatment of masculinity, an issue to which weshall return, it is important to establish how Marla, in particular Marla-as-cancer, triggers a second level of deterritorialisation that will only beeased – temporarily – by the advent of Tyler.

Beyond toying with the notion of calling his tumour Marla, thereare several other ways in which Marla can be understood to operatein a cancerous fashion. Her consistent smoking (even in cancer recoverysessions), for instance, along with her claims of actually having cancerduring an attention-seeking ‘suicide’ attempt (‘my tit is rotting off’)thematically associate her with cancer and its causes. Furthermore,her gothic appearance – black eyeliner, black clothes – also grant hera form of necrotic presence that begins spreading everywhere. As acancerous force, Marla becomes another active agent in the narrator’sdeterritorialising process. This notion is signalled during a supportgroup scene where the narrator joins terminally ill sufferers in guidedmeditation, whereby they retreat into their ‘healing caves’. Typically, thenarrator finds his ‘power animal’ there, a computer generated imagery(CGI) penguin that encourages him to ‘slide’. However, once Marlaarrives, she replaces the penguin, and, exhaling smoke, implores him to‘slide’, or, for the sake of this argument, deterritorialise. In other words,Marla begins to assert her presence in both the narrator’s waking anddream life.

By degrees, the narrator quits the groups, meets Tyler and begins FightClub. Mirroring the initial affect and effect of the support groups, the


physical experience of violence functions as a physical and psychologicalrelease that allows him to sleep. But, where the therapy sessions helpedreterritorialise the narrator, in that he could sleep safe in his IKEAcatalogue-like apartment, here the violence is part of a prolonged andtemporarily more satisfactory deterritorialisation. Losing his home, thenarrator joins Tyler in an abandoned house, and begins to lose teethand turn up at work with a bruised face and body. Seduced by Tyler, heeventually rejects the consumerist lifestyle that characterised his earlierexistence. The violence therefore serves as a deterritorialising force; asPisters argues, it equals ‘the shocks in the brain’ and is ‘connected toa strategy of deterritorialisation’ (Pisters 2003: 97–8). We can locateanother echo of a body and mind parallelism in Pisters’s equation ofcerebral and physical violence here, but we should presently like to spendsome time sorting through the complexity of this deterritorialisation.

We have argued the narrator’s flirtations with danger serve adeterritorialising end, and that this process is subsequently rounded offby a reterritorialisation signalled through his ability to sleep. However,if his misery tourism and initial forays into violence are undertaken withthe goal of reterritorialisation, then what real deterritorialisation is goingon? That the deterritorialisation is undertaken with a specific goal inmind suggests that this is only a reterritorialising deterritorialisation.But in fact this reterritorialisation that lies at the heart of the narrator’sfirst and superficial attempts at deterritorialisation occult – at least atfirst – a more profound deterritorialisation. For it will ultimately turnout that the narrator has not been asleep (or ‘reterritorialised’) at all.As Tyler, the narrator has been escalating the violence of Fight Clubto ever-greater levels, culminating in Project Mayhem. As this is onlyrevealed at the climax of the film (when we watch it for the first time), thecontinued deterritorialisation that takes place in spite of the appearanceof reterritorialisation (he seems happier/can sleep) must be manifested indifferent ways. How is this so?

The continued, ‘deeper’ deterritorialisation is manifested through thereappearance of Marla and the appearance of the Project Mayhemgoons who move in with Tyler and the narrator. Here, the analogybetween Marla and cancer can be extended: in the same way that sheis a continued and persistent ‘cancerous’ presence in the film, so, too,does the increased presence of other black-clad and nameless figuresin the mise-en-scène reinforce as much. Like a cancer growing, theProject Mayhem goons come to represent the continued but evolvingdeterritorialisation of the narrator’s world. Their dilapidated home thusbecomes the body in which these malignant, or terrorist, ‘cells’ take


their place; according to the narrator, the house becomes ‘a living thing,wet inside with so many people sweating and breathing’. It is from thisbase that the terrorist organisation mounts its attack on the surroundingorgans of the embedding culture. That is, Fight Clubs and terrorist cellsbegin to crop up everywhere across the US, and these are organisedby Tyler, who takes advantage of the narrator’s travels to coordinateProject Mayhem. It is important to stress, then, that even though wedo not know as much until near the film’s end, Tyler is also part ofthe deterritorialisation of the narrator, and utilises the rhizomatic webof national airline routes to spread Project Mayhem (cultural cancer) ina way similar to a disease travelling around the body’s circulatory andcardiovascular system.

Finally, the increased, ‘deeper’ deterritorialisation of the narratortaking place without his (or the first-time viewer’s) knowledge, isalso marked in an affective scene depicting unhinged violence wagedagainst an unconscious opponent, Angel Face (Jared Leto). While thereare several scenes of ritualised violence in the film, which collectivelywitness the body become an affective threshold of intensity, in thisscene both form and content synergistically interface to affectivelyframe a deranged attack, which transcends the (diegetically) establishedritualised codes. Framed from the victim’s position and scored withaffective sounds of pounding flesh and crunching bone, the sceneformulates a gruesome unflinching visceral experience, in which thenarrator reveals that all is not well and that he, too, needs to go furtherand become more deterritorialised if he is to find peace or happinessagain.

Between insomnia, hunger, cancer and violence, then, we get a senseof the central role that the body plays in Fight Club and particularly inthe narrator’s deterritorialising line of flight from bourgeois consumeristconformity to anarchistic terrorist. However, as we indicated above,the body is not alone in this process. If insomnia and hunger can helpbreak down the boundaries between reality and illusion, between selfand other, and if cancer can do the same, in that a cancer is both alienand within us, and if violence can also change our thoughts by makingmarks on and modifying our bodies, then the parallel brain, too, mustequally be involved in this process.

V. Deterritorialising the Brain

We explained earlier that the narrator’s insomniac experiences areconveyed expressively via a combination of sound and mise-en-scène:


warping distortions and washed-out lighting trouble our ability to tellwhat is real and what is not, and expressionistically reflect the narrator’sexperiences. While Fight Club does feature a now-famous twist endingwhereby the narrator discovers he is Tyler and the mastermind behindProject Mayhem, we might initially suspect that the end sees the narratorreterritorialised as ‘himself’, in that Tyler is ‘dead’, despite the fact thatProject Mayhem appears to have destroyed the banks. We have alreadymentioned, however, how the closing splice-in of a penis hints thatTyler is, in fact, still at large. While this is seemingly so, we should liketo extend the argument somewhat further, by suggesting that there isvery little in the film that we can truly claim to be ‘real’ or ‘outside’of the narrator’s brain. This is manifest in that final splice-in: Tyler,should he be the perpetrator, does not splice the penis into a film withinFight Club (as happens earlier). Rather the film into which the penisis spliced is Fight Club itself. In other words, not only might Tylerand other elements of the mise-en-scène be figments of the narrator’simagination, but so might the whole film. How can we mount such anargument?

We shall make this argument by looking specifically at the characterof Marla, and posit that she, too, is as much a figment of the narrator’simagination as Tyler. ‘And suddenly I realised that all of this, theguns, the bombs, the revolution had something to do with a girlnamed Marla Singer,’ says the narrator after the film’s opening shots.Although we may not take note of the importance of these wordsduring an initial viewing, they become the first clue hinting at Marlanot being a real person. Indeed, not only is it logically unlikely fora woman to attend therapy sessions for testicular cancer sufferers (orto smoke at an emphysema victims group), but, when the narratoraddresses her on the issue, she walks away, crossing a road to pawnsome stolen clothes. (Narrator: ‘Let’s not make a big thing of this.’Marla, walking away: ‘How’s this for not making a big thing?’) Marlacrosses the road, effortlessly missing speeding vehicles that intercut herpath. The narrator, however, steps forward to encounter car horns,screeching brakes and skidding tyres. Is the fact that Marla ghostsacross without a problem, whilst the narrator is nearly killed, also anindicative clue hinting that Marla does not exist? As a virtual image,Marla may well function as a fantasy manifestation and embodimentof the narrator’s guilt and unease at being a tourist at the supportgroups. Viewing Marla as another virtual splitting of the narrator is alsoverbally hinted at, when the narrator informs us that ‘her lie reflectedmy lie’.


The narrator lies awake in bed imagining approaching Marla todemand she stop attending the groups; when he ‘actually’ approachesher, however, Marla quickly announces she has seen him practisingthis, suggesting that she, like Tyler, might know everything he thinksand feels. Furthermore, when the two finally barter to divide upthe groups, Marla tellingly says she wants the ‘brain parasite’ and‘organic brain dementia’ meetings. This also prompts the narratorto respond: ‘You can’t have the whole brain!’ This exchange notonly reinforces the possibility that Marla is a brain-screen image (anembodied manifestation of a thought), but it also creates a circuit withanother scene where Tyler discusses his desire to kill off his ‘loser alterego’ (the narrator) in order to take over the whole brain.

Through a series of visual rhymes and thematic reflections, Marlais also linked to the virtual image of Tyler, serving to reinforce thesense that she is not ‘real’. As Marla’s introductory vignette ends, forinstance, she is framed in silhouette walking into the depth of the frame.A subliminal flash of Tyler is momentarily introduced so their bodiesoccupy the same position onscreen. Both also wear dark sunglasses(whilst indoors) when we first see them, and both are in the habit ofstealing things (Marla steals clothes and food, while Tyler steals humanliposuction fat to make soap and bombs). Both characters also smokeand circle mysteriously around the crowds at group therapy sessionsand Fight Club meetings, where couples come together to hug or fightrespectively. While we have already mentioned how Marla manages toinfiltrate the narrator’s ‘healing cave’, it might also be worth mentioningthat she literally seems to fuse with Tyler during a sex scene which is theproduct of the narrator’s imagination: their coital bodies rendered in ablurry CGI sequence that Fincher discusses as a Francis Bacon versionof Mount Rushmore (Swallow 2003: 130).

What might be the significance of identifying Marla as another(earlier) virtual image/character on a par with Tyler? Deleuze andGuattari may provide an illuminating answer, when they contendthat it becomes ‘the special situation of women in relation to theman-standard’ that accounts for the fact that all becomings initiallypass through a ‘becoming-woman’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 321).Here, it would appear Marla formulates the first virtual thresholdof the narrator’s becoming process; somewhat ironically introducedduring the ‘Remaining Men Together’ testicular cancer meeting, thatis an event attended by castrated males. Marla enters as the narratorhugs Bob (a man in a physical process of becoming-woman with hisaforementioned ‘bitch tits’). If Fight Club can be accused of forwarding


a masculinist narrative, then, this becoming-woman process mightconceivably highlight how the film does not respect boundaries betweeninside and out, and between self and other, in that not only is Tylerrevealed to be the projected and embodied fantasy of the narrator, but sois Marla. What is more, rather than allow these figures to be re-centredaround/reterritorialised within the male narrator, we would posit afurther, deterritorialising ambiguity: these are not so much projectionsof the narrator as also the narrator. Marla is not some ‘female’ aspect ofa ‘male’ narrator, then, but rather the narrator is both sexes, male andfemale, at once, and potentially a whole lot more (including Bob whois somehow both female – castrated and with breasts – and male, whilenot quite being either at the same time). Tyler, Marla, Bob: they arenot ‘part of’ the narrator; they are the narrator, such that we cannotattribute sex or gender except as a means of simplifying for the sakeof argument what he/she/it is. In this way, masculinist or misogynistreadings of the film become hard to sustain: the boundary betweengenders is not one the film observes, then, but one it troubles, evenif instinctively we feel tempted to ‘reterritorialise’ it within traditionalgender(ed) interpretations.

VI. The Form of Fight Club

The above examples provide a good link into a discussion of Fight Club’sfilmic form. That is, while the narrative content tells the story of acharacter whose bodily experiences are impossible to distinguish, or arecut in fluid fashion with, ‘his’ mental experiences, we can recognise thesesame themes reflected by the film’s formal and aesthetic construction. Weshall highlight this by investigating the film’s expressive lighting scheme,its depiction of bodies, and the new forms of space generated by digitaltechnologies.

Fight Club has a very stylised look, as was intimated by ourdiscussion of the expressionistic use of colour to affectively conveythe psychological effects of insomnia. Throughout, the film’s aestheticis further blocked using a dark, saturated Technicolor palette, withthe underground Fight Club spaces having a chthonic appearance thatcontrasts with the electric blue over-world office spaces. In order to holdand capture the film’s low light levels, Fincher and cinematographerJeff Cronenweth used non-anamorphic spherical lenses and variousdevelopment processes to render a style that visually echoes the film’skey themes. As Fincher says:


We talked about making it a dirty-looking movie, kind of grainy. When weprocessed it, we stretched the contrast to make it kind of ugly, a little bit ofunderexposure, a little bit of re-silvering, and using new high-contrast printstocks and stepping all over it, so it has a dirty patina. (Swallow 2003: 143–4)

The dark spaces often feature the greatest amount of bodily action(the brawls), while the contrasting washed-out lighter spaces reflect theaffected spiritual or cerebral dimensions of the film. In keeping with theabove discussion of a mind and body parallelism, Amy Taubin arguesthe film’s use of light provides ‘such a perfect balance of aesthetics andadrenaline [. . . that it feels] like a solution to the mind–body split’(Taubin 1999: 18). Significantly, actors’ bodies are depicted as lean,muscular and ‘taut’, especially Brad Pitt’s as Tyler. Pamela ChurchGibson (2004) argues that this clearly fetishises and commodifies themale bodies, highlighting a ‘gaze’ that becomes ambiguous, upsettinga normative (straight) viewing position without reinscribing an overtly‘oppositional’ or ‘gay’ one.

We shall return to the spectator of Fight Club shortly, but first turnour attention to the film’s editing and, in particular, how it uses digitaltechnology to create spaces that can be navigated with a new (total)ease. The film opens with a virtuoso two-and-a-half minute trackingshot beginning in the fear centre of the narrator’s brain (although wedo not necessarily know this on first viewing), moving backwards pastfiring synapses and floating cells of bodily matter, before acceleratingoutwards via a pore, past a giant drop of sweat dribbling from his pateamidst giant, looming bristles of hair, down his face and along the barrelof a gun. As the ‘camera’ passes the gun’s sights, it comes to a rest. Thefocus changes and what previously had been only an affective rush ofcolour is pulled into focus to become recognisable as the face of EdwardNorton with gun in mouth.

Instants later, while the narrator is explaining the nature of ProjectMayhem’s plot, an illustrative camera rushes vertiginously down theoutside of the skyscraper from the top floor, down through the pavementand ground into a basement car park which houses a bomb nestledalongside a concrete column. The camera then changes trajectory,heading sideways – again at breakneck speed – through areas of solidearth until it reaches another subterranean car park, in which the cameraraces towards a van, through a bullet hole in its rear window, performinga circling close-up of a bomb counting down to destroy the buildingswe have just impossibly and rapidly travelled through. Both shots arein part constructed through the use of CGI and animation – since it


would be physically impossible to manipulate a material camera to passfrom the inside of a human actor’s brain to the outside, while changingits focal range so we see individual synapses at one moment and aface in focus the next. Similarly, one could not easily drop a materialcamera thirty-one storeys, through the ground, across an undergroundspace, through a bullet hole and around a bomb in one continuous fluidmovement.

That these examples are computer generated is formally important,as we shall see, but it is the continuity of the shots that we shouldlike to emphasise at present. For while, as discussed above, the shotsof the lye-burning are intercut with images of green woods and wordsfrom dictionaries, such that we switch perceptibly from an image ofwhat is happening in the diegetic world to images of thoughts, herethe distinction between the two is not so clear cut. While the montagesequence of the lye-burning happens rapidly – so quickly, that we cannotcount the shots but must simply get caught up in the speed of the filmitself – we can still tell that we are seeing a montage of shots cut together.When the ‘camera’ (which is not really a material camera) passes fromthe inside to the outside of the narrator’s brain in the film’s opening, wecannot so easily separate inside from outside by breaking the sequenceinto shots. Rather, the inside of the brain and the outside ‘physical’world are rendered ‘impossibly’ as one single continuum. It is not thatfantasy and reality are presented as binary opposites, then. Instead FightClub shows that fantasy continues into reality and vice versa in such away that we can no longer tell them apart.

The subsequent plunge taken by the CG ‘camera’ into the basementachieves a similar effect. Since we start with a shot of Tyler from outsidethe building while they wait for the bombs to detonate, we mightbelieve that this is an ‘objective’ shot of the action. However, sincethe camera responds to the narrator’s voice-over and takes us downto the bomb, it becomes clear the film is responding to his thoughtprocesses: we see what the narrator wants us to see – meaning that thefilm is not ‘objective’ at all, but rather highly subjective (if we candistinguish the two). However, where Fincher could easily have cutdirectly from Tyler to the bombs, he does not. The refusal to cut hasan added effect: by showing the space between Tyler, the narrator andthe bombs, Fincher shows us their connected nature. This similarly blursthe boundary between the objective and the subjective, in a way thatis more troubling than using cuts, since we cannot but falsely impose aboundary between where the film becomes ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’, ifthe lack of a cut means that there is no boundary. In cinematic terms, this


is not necessarily new, since Citizen Kane (1941) features similar cameramovements in the famous shot where the camera travels through the ElRancho nightclub’s neon sign before descending through a skylight intothe bar where a drunk Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) slouches.The impression of continuity across two shots is here achieved througha dissolve, but the film fails to present a truly convincing continuousspace, since the angles between the first and second shot do not exactlymatch. The continuous spaces in Fight Club, meanwhile, are free of suchmismatches, in part because they are created using 3D digital spaceswhich negate the need for changing material camera positions, andbecause the movements can be so much faster than those of CitizenKane. This speed of the movement is important, not just in terms ofmoving too fast for viewers to notice ‘flaws’ in continuity, but also interms of the camera movement arguably appearing as ‘fast’ as a cut.Whereas film has perhaps long since had the ability to ‘move’ at the speedof thought via editing, here the ‘camera’ can achieve this effect withoutediting, meaning the boundary between thought-images and pro-filmic‘reality’ becomes blurred.

In other words, Fight Club is shot in a style that makes formreinforce content: in a narrative in which we shall finally not be ableto tell apart the narrator from Tyler from Marla, such that they allform a ‘schizophrenic’ continuum (in a similar manner to Deleuze andGuattari’s thesis that ‘at root every name in history is I’ [Deleuze andGuattari 1983: 85–6]), so, too, is the space in the film shown as aschizophrenic continuum, that passes literally from inside to outsideof the brain as if there were no division between the two, and fromseemingly objective to subjective shots as well. As Fincher has said, ina way that is reminiscent of Deleuze’s call for cinema as a depiction ofthought:

It’s like, pfpp, take a look at it, pfpp, pull the next thing down [. . . ]. It’s gottamove as quick as you can think. We’ve gotta come up with a way that thecamera can illustrate things at the speed of thought. (Quoted in Smith 1999:58)

These sequences of intense continuity differ, slightly, from the‘intensified continuity’ of contemporary cinema noted by Bordwell(2002). Bordwell describes the increased cutting rate of contemporarycinema, while here we are describing a cinema that does not (seem to)cut at all. However, it is not that these sequences, and others like it,including the narrator walking through an IKEA catalogue, and thecamera becoming the gas spreading around the narrator’s apartment


before it is destroyed, are ‘better’ than the lye-burning sequence that usesmontage. Indeed, the use of montage during the lye-burning heightensthe tension and invasive violence of that particular moment. Rather, inFight Club the camera (and the film) seems capable of doing whateverit wants; it does not have to use either montage or continuity; it canuse both as and when it desires and for expressive purposes. Again,the option of using montage and/or continuity has long been availableto filmmakers, but the ability to pass through solid objects (skulls andwalls), the ability to change scale (neurons and entire heads in the sameshot), and the speed with which this is rendered onscreen intensifies theblurred boundary between the imaginary and the real, particularly whencontinuity is taken to these extremes.

Earlier we mentioned a moment wherein the narrator hugs Bob,significantly at the same moment Marla is introduced. We in factencounter this sequence twice within the film. The first time formulatesthe initial jump backwards into a sheet of past which kick-starts theentire flashback – as if the narrator deliberately wanted to return to thismoment (of becoming-woman) as the starting point for the story of hisdeterritorialisation. In the second occurrence, the now-familiar imageis replayed, but we find Marla enter at the exact moment when thenarrator forms a hugging assemblage with Bob’s ‘bitch tits’. This isthe moment of forking time that orients and justifies the first flashback.Significantly, in the space of the ‘Remaining Men Together’ group, wecan perceive how Marla, or the becoming-woman process in general, isrelated to and formulates an assemblage with the concept of organicsickness and disease, and thereafter continues to inform the natureof the immanent deterritorialisation process (becoming-cancer). Theseinstances of repeated shots and recurring time loops, often with minordifferences, also go to show that the film is edited in such a way as to bethe thought of the (unreliable) narrator, and thus offer us a strange butoriginal form of time-image that infests a narrative that might otherwisebe considered an action-image.

The digital nature of many of the images can reinforce this sense.For, when the digital ‘camera’ can pass smoothly through walls andhuman heads, or change scale at will, then these continuous digitalspaces call for new modes of thought and action because these kindsof continuities have been hard if not impossible to achieve (at leastphotorealistically) without the digital technology used to create them. Assuch, the digital nature of these shots is linked to new ways of thinkingabout time and space. In this film, both time and space are presentedas a fluid continuum: space can be traversed in spite of the nature of


the supposedly material objects that fill it; time, likewise, can be crossedlike a space – backwards and forwards, sideways, in whichever directionthe narrator’s brain takes us and without obstacles. In other words,these sequences present us with any-spaces-whatever, except that, unlikethe ‘traditional’ any-spaces-whatever described by Deleuze, these aresupermodern or, what William Brown (2009) might term ‘posthuman’any-spaces-whatever. We propose this because of the continuity betweeninside and outside that is (digitally) presented: since the ‘camera’ canand does go anywhere, our sense of identifiable spatial coordinates isundermined – and, what is (retroactively) understood as the inside andthen the outside of the narrator’s head/brain becomes a vertiginous rushof changing colours.

Again, the form here matches the content, since much of the narrator’slife is spent in airports and anonymous hotels, the kind of non-placesdescribed by Marc Augé (1995), and which have been linked by RédaBensmaïa (1997) to Deleuze’s concept of the any-space-whatever (evenif, contra Bensmaïa, Deleuze does not himself refer to Marc Augé in hiswork, but to Pascal Auger, a former student [Deleuze 2005a: 112]).1

Production designer Alex McDowell tried to ensure that locationslike ‘the airliner interior, the hotel rooms, the office and Jack’s [sic]apartment all used the same palette of colours and fabrics, suggestingthe “sameness of life outside the Fight Club” ’ (Swallow 2003: 128).In other words, the film consciously tries to anonymise and homogenisethe spaces in which much of the narrative takes place, making these non-places also become any-spaces-whatever, and demanding new modes ofthought and movement.

VII. The Fight Club Spectator

While we have thus far often mentioned the viewer and the spectator(sometimes referring to these as ‘we’) in relation to Fight Club, we shouldnow like to turn our attention more particularly to the film’s viewer(s).For, while Fight Club might in content be a film about bodies whichdepicts not only thoughts (inserts of the narrator’s brain patterns) butthought itself (the process of thinking, as demonstrated in the film’sstyle/form), then what does this say of the spectator? Firstly, we shouldlike to say that Fight Club affects its spectator in much the same waythat the characters seem to be affected in the film. That is, Fight Club isfor the spectator both a physical (visceral, or affective) experience, andan experience that can inspire new forms of thought.


Earlier, we mentioned the scene in which the narrator disfigures AngelFace in a fight (‘because I wanted to destroy something beautiful’). Wementioned the way in which the sequence is shot from the victim’spoint of view and how the sound of the violence is affectively amplified:cartilage and bones crunch, skin slips and splits as the narrator manglesthe young man’s visage. As in the lye-burning scene in which we seeimages of skin searing, the shots of the narrator’s face being torn apartwhen he shoots himself in the jaw, and the fights more generally, here,too, the filmmakers are interested not just in showing spectators whatis happening, but in placing viewers ‘within’ the action such that theyexperience the film not just in a detached, visual manner, but physically,viscerally even. And if the film is designed to affect the spectator ina physical manner, one might say that Fight Club does to the viewerwhat it depicts happening to the characters. That is, the film enactsa physical form of violence that is deterritorialising and puts viewers’bodies through new experiences that call for new modes of thinking andmovement, and allow us to become, as opposed to simply being: weexperience insomnia with the narrator via the distorted sound, colourand flickers of Tyler across the screen; and we watch not just Tylersplicing pornographic frames into other movies, but also, pornographicframes being spliced into this movie. The narrative actively seeks toaffect its viewers directly as opposed to merely telling a story aboutsomeone who terrorises film viewers.

Fight Club’s narrator offers us technical explanations about ‘cigaretteburns’ or ‘changeover’ marks, which we see in movies when a projectionreel has nearly run its course and needs switching. As he explains this invoice-over, Tyler illustrates by pointing to an actual ‘cigarette burn’ thatfeatures in/on Fight Club itself. Furthermore, Tyler rhapsodises aboutthe woes and taunts of contemporary consumerist lifestyle, addressingthe camera directly and even managing to dislodge the film itself fromits projector, revealing the celluloid image’s sprockets. These examplessuggest that Fight Club not only wants to affect us physically, but alsomentally, assaulting any passive spectatorial engagement. That is, as itbecomes harder to tell apart the diegetic from the non-diegetic, wherethe film world begins and ends, not least because we are directly spokento and because we apparently – impossibly – see the very film that we arewatching being ripped from its projector, Fight Club seeks to inducechallenging new modes of thought. Schizoanalytically speaking, it seeksto induce schizoanalysis: not only can the viewer not tell apart thenarrator from Tyler (from Marla) within the film, but the film also paysno attention to the supposed boundary between the fictional world and


our real world. Fight Club might be a fictional film, but its physicalaffects and the new modes of thought that it inspires are genuinely realexperiences, and so perform modes of cinematic becoming.

In this manner, what ‘shocks’ the film achieves on our body, it perhapsalso inflicts on our brain. In other words, while Fight Club is a film thatmoves at the ‘speed of thought’, darting from one moment in time to thenext, across spaces at breakneck speed, it also sets up three intertwinedand parallel time frames reminiscent of the time-image (the three-minutecountdown to the towers exploding as the film commences, the dilatedflashback memory embedded within this short period, and the viewingtime of the film itself). Although ostensibly an action film, Fight Clubdoes, as Pisters argues, involve movement-images that expressively toywith time-image regimes. Rather than a straightforward film that tellsthe story in chronological order, the ‘cerebral’ nature of the narrationeffectively unsettles our relationship with time and seeks to make usaware of the non-linear processes entailed in thought and memory.

Beyond its crystalline treatment of time, the film is also a ‘twist’movie designed to be re-viewed and re-experienced after an initial,‘naïve’ viewing. On account of this, a powerful cinematic consciousnesssurfaces that knows more than any of the characters embedded withinthe diegesis. The film’s formal construction thus becomes responsiblefor introducing a virtual and actual circuit into the narrative, since uponsubsequent viewings, each spectator retains a memory (a virtual ‘past-that-is-preserved’) of their initial viewing that overlaps and contrastswith the actual images perceived during a second or third encounter.Fight Club therefore plays with time on a meta-cinematic level, andillustrates how time can bring the ‘truth’ of an image into crisis. In otherwords, Fight Club is not a one-off phenomenon, but a film to be re-viewed and which makes its presence felt in the ‘real world’ such thatfiction and reality become indiscernible.

Mark B. N. Hansen (2004) has argued Deleuze did not give enoughweight to the spectator, and suggests that recent neuroscientific findingsin fact go against some of his arguments concerning the cinema viewingexperience. However, Richard Rushton (2009) has recently broughtthe ‘Deleuzian spectator’ to prominence: film viewers are not so muchconscious of a film but conscious with a film. We ‘fuse’ with it whenviewing in such a way that the film-viewer assemblage constitutes a newform of consciousness, a new form of thought. Viewing Fight Club notonly involves such a process (since this process happens de facto, albeitwith differing degrees of intensity), but it quite self-consciously involvessuch a process, as the über-rapid movement in any and all directions


and across time, together with the direct address to the audience, makesclear. To paraphrase the narrator, ‘I am Jack’s brain’ might be a usefulstarting point for us to articulate what happens when watching the film.But we can go further than this: I become Jack’s brain, such that Jackand the film and I (the viewer) cannot be distinguished anymore. Wehave become a new consciousness that fundamentally deterritorialisesus from our ‘normal’ selves and allows us to become. Since the filminvolves people whose altered physical states (through fights, burns,etc.) lead to new modes of thought (that is, changes in the body leadto changes in the brain – as a result of mind–body parallelism), so isthis true for the viewer with regard to the physical states in which thefilm puts us. Robert Sinnerbrink (2008) has called for something likea rapprochement between the ‘affect’ and the ‘brain’ Deleuzians, and aschizoanalysis of Fight Club allows us to put this into effect: not onlywithin the film do physical experiences lead to new modes of thoughtfor the characters, but the film itself is for the spectator a physical andmental experience that leads to new modes of thought, new becomings.

As such, Pitt describes the film as a ‘virus’ because it is not ‘a film youcan just watch; it’s a contagious set of ideas [. . . that] will make you feelsomething’ (Swallow 2003: 143–4). One might say, then, that the filminvolves a ‘cancerous’ becoming, but not necessarily with the negativeconnotations that this typically entails. ‘Marla is like one of those soreson the top of your mouth that you wished would go away but can’t helptonguing’, says the narrator as he finds Marla in his ‘healing cave’. In amanner akin to the becomings that Steven Shaviro (1993) has describedin David Cronenberg’s work, the disease-virus-cancer-sore that is FightClub involves a becoming that may not be uniquely pleasurable, butis a becoming in which we are profoundly involved nonetheless – andit is up to us to use this becoming positively (in effect, to treat this‘cancer’ as a part of our newly constituted selves, to nourish and notdeny it). Palahniuk (2005) writes that both his novel and the film (moreparticularly the film) have spawned many real-life Fight Clubs: if he isto be believed (if reality is, as Palahniuk titles his memoir, Stranger thanFiction, then perhaps we can schizoanalytically believe nothing), thenit would seem that not only does the film affect us in theory or duringviewing, but it can also lead to new movements and thoughts in real life.

VIII. Conclusion: Fight Club as Hollywood Film

We have endeavoured to use schizoanalysis to interpret Fight Club notjust as a film about a narrator undergoing deterritorialising experiences


that lead to new becomings (starting with the becoming-woman signifiedthrough the presence of Marla Singer), but as a film that enacts a formof schizoanalysis on or with the viewer. The potential for schizoanalysisis in any and every film (we become conscious with all films, perhapswith the world itself at each and every moment), but in Fight Club thispotential is realised and brought to the fore with an intensity that is oftenunseen in mainstream Hollywood cinema.

While Fight Club is a narrative that critiques the unthinking natureof the consumerist lifestyle, the film is itself a commodity designedto make money, not just in the theatre, but through DVD sales andso on. Like Tyler himself, the film perhaps betrays megalomaniacaland fascistic leanings as much as it is a critique of these processes.The narrator may seek to prevent Tyler from destroying the corporateconsumerist world, but he fails (Tyler is still at large come the film’sclosing; the banks are destroyed). But this failure is not necessarilymatched by any change in the real world. Even if real Fight Clubshave been created as a result of the film, does the film-as-commodityin fact reinforce as much as it seeks to overthrow the consumeristlifestyle? If schizoanalysis as a process seeks to disrupt the ‘unthinking’modes of thought consumerist modernity might impose upon us, hasschizoanalysis ultimately failed when it has been co-opted into orbecome ‘axiomatised’ within mainstream Hollywood filmmaking?

While we might speculate that Deleuze would be unimpressed withFight Club had he seen it, does the above analysis suggest that Deleuzeoverlooked the schizoanalytic potential of the mainstream? Or doesit suggest that (a version of) Deleuzian thought has itself becomemainstream, meaning that we must now seek to find even ‘newer’ waysof thinking and moving in the world – new experiences that will enablenewer becomings? If Fight Club is a product of capitalism, which alwaysseeks to produce new others precisely so as to consume them andto be able to grow, then is it really revolutionary at all? We suspectthat the answer is both: Fight Club realises a potential that Deleuzemay not have seen in mainstream, action-image cinema, while it alsomust to a degree undermine the power of that potential, perhaps byvirtue of that potential being realised in and of itself. However, ratherthan being a negative thing, we can also read this as a new foldin Deleuzian thought: Fight Club may reterritorialise schizoanalysis,but this reterritorialisation of deterritorialisation is simultaneously adeterritorialisation of the modes of thought that reify and reterritorialiseDeleuze. Fight Club is famous for its so-called rules, the first rule beingthat you do not talk about Fight Club. The law may condemn behaviour


that is deemed unethical (from the point of view of the law, Tyler Durdenis a criminal), but ‘the man who obeys the law does not thereby becomerighteous; on the contrary, he feels guilty and is guilty in advance, andthe more strict his obedience, the greater his guilt’ (Deleuze 1989: 84). Incontrast to obeying the law, then, and beyond good and evil, we say thatwhen it comes to finding out what a body can do, there are no rules. Letus schizoanalyse schizoanalysis, deterritorialise deterritorialisation, andunlock the potential for becoming that lies not just in Fight Club, but ineach and every encounter we have.

Note1. Pascal Auger’s name is misspelt when Deleuze first mentions the concept of the

any-space-whatever in Cinema 1 (Deleuze 2005a: 112). Paris VIII has publishedonline transcripts and recordings of Deleuze’s seminars on cinema, and theseinclude one in which Deleuze credits Pascal Auger with the concept of the any-space-whatever, and in which Auger himself also talks about the term in relationto Michael Snow’s Wavelength. However ingenious (and still valid) the linkbetween Marc Augé and Deleuze, it was not one intended by Deleuze himself.See Deleuze 1982 for more.

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brown and fleming - schizo analysis and fight club

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